Little sleep, a tiny Nash, 30 seconds on network TV and no regretsLinda Lotridge Levin recalls how she and two other student reporters drove from Michigan to Massachusetts to witness a historic election countdown

By LINDA LOTRIDGE LEVIN

I WAS TWO MONTHS AWAY from entering my junior year at Michigan State University when Senator John F. Kennedy got the Democratic nomination for president. His Republican opponent was Richard M. Nixon, who had been President Dwight Eisenhower’s two-term vice president. I knew little about Kennedy, but when I began reading about him and saw pictures of him and his photogenic family, I was hooked.

THE KENNEDYS, Jacqueline and John, at their Newport, R.I. wedding, in 1953. Courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

Presidents during my life had been old, gray-haired men. Here was someone young (he was 43), and good looking and to my small-town Michigan ear, his Boston/Yankee accent was exotic, even romantic. I immediately signed up to campaign for him on the campus even though I was an editor on The State News, our student daily. No one there seemed to care that I was crossing an ethical line, and neither did I.Had I been asked to choose, I might well have left the newspaper, at least until after the campaign.When Senator Kennedy visited the campus that fall, I begged to cover his talk for the newspaper.

It was a warm, sunny fall day when he spoke outside the student union to a mob of screaming students and some sedate faculty. I did not get the personal interview that I wanted nor did I shake his hand. Still, seeing him in person made me feel pretty good. I wrote the story and continued to closely follow the campaign. I especially delighted in the exquisite photos of the senator and his wife in Look and Life magazines. In those days with television shows and newspaper pictures in black and white, these magazines were the places to see great colored photography.

Courtesy: John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

THE BIG ASSIGNMENT On Friday, November 4, four days before the election, I was hanging around the newspaper when Kit, one of the other editors came up to me and suggested that she, another staffer, Sharon, and I drive to Hyannis, Massachusetts, the media headquarters for the Kennedy election. We would cover the election for the paper. On our own dime, of course. Sharon and I were in. But we needed press passes. Kit found two, although I have no recollection of how or where she got them, but she was one of the most resourceful people I knew. This meant only two of us could enter the armory in Hyannis where the press would be gathered. But more about that later. We decided to leave on Monday after our classes, which ended in mid-afternoon, and drive straight to Hyannis, something only college kids who needed little sleep and had no sense of geography and distances would tackle. I’m not sure that we brought a map, and I don’t think any of us had been in New England. I called my mother, a teacher who was non-plused in the most stressful of moments, and informed her of our plans. She said something like, “Drive safely.” Kit picked us up at our dorm in her dark blue Nash Metropolitan which today would be about the size of a Mini Cooper. Back then in the days of American cars on steroids, her Nash seemed tiny, with enough room for one journalist and her typewriter to work on the back seat. We headed east to Port Huron, Michigan, crossed the Blue Water Bridge and sped across Ontario, on the still new and speed-friendly Queen Elizabeth Way. (No passports were needed to enter Canada then. A Customs officer would ask your name and where you were born and nonchalantly wave you through.) It was dark, probably around midnight, when we crossed over the east end of Lake Erie via the Peace Bridge into Buffalo, New York. After the darkness of Ontario, mostly farmland where we had driven, it was a shock and a thrill to see that long bridge lit up. Now exhausted, Kit relinquished the wheel, and we took turns driving across the New York Thruway and the Massachusetts Turnpike to Boston where we promptly got lost. It was about 7 a.m. when we ended up somewhere around Boston Common. Groggy and hungry, we spotted a policeman directing traffic and asked him the way to Hyannis. First, we found a doughnut shop and fueled up.

THE ARRIVAL We finally arrived in the little town by the sea. We had driven almost 850 miles. We asked someone walking along Main Street how we could find the National Guard Armory. It was on South Street, a block off Main Street, and journalists from around the world were gathering there. (Later we learned that more than 250 were in town.) Before we found a parking spot, we decided that we had not come all this way not to see the Kennedy Compound as it was called. Our instincts told us to follow the cars, and somehow we found it, a short drive from downtown Hyannis in a separate village called Hyannis Port, right on the water.

THE KENNEDY COMPOUND - Summer home of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port, Mass., on Cape Cod. Courtesy National Park Service

We drove along the narrow road as far as we could, but police officers were posted at the entrance to the homes. We could easily see the three large white “cottages” that comprised the compound. We knew that the patriarch Joseph and his wife Rose owned one; Robert Kennedy, younger brother of the senator, and his wife Ethel owned one, and the third one belonged to Sen. John Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline, known as Jackie.

THE NATIONAL GUARD ARMORY in Hyannis, Mass. Source: Wikipedia

We sat there for a few minutes speculating about which house belonged to the candidate before a not-so-friendly police officer walked up to our car and told us to move on.

DOWN TO WORK We headed back to the armory and surprisingly found a parking place on one of the nearby side streets. Now we had a problem. Two press passes for three people. After scoping out the perimeter of the building, we came up with a solution. Sharon and Kit, holding the passes, would enter the armory. Then one of them would go to an open window we had seen and hand me her press pass. Perfect. The only flaw in our plan was that the three of us could not leave the building together, and we were hungry. So I gave Kit and Sharon some money and they left in search of food. I have no recollection of what they brought back for me, but it must have been sufficient, because along with the heavy dose of adrenaline we were experiencing being with the some of the country’s top political journalists, it kept us fueled and awake for a second night. We had plunked our typewriter down on a wooden table in the middle of the pack of journalists on what appeared to be about the only available piece of real estate in the cavernous room. We looked around. I spotted Homer Bigart, the New York Times reporter, whose political writing from Washington I read religiously. As a former reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune, he had won Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of both World War II and the Korean War. I saw another New York Times reporter, Nan Robertson, who covered news and women’s features and who a few years later was in the newspaper’s Washington bureau covering the White House. She was my role model for years.

ROLE REVERSAL: CBS NEWS INTERVIEWS ME We had just settled in at our work station when a man came up to me and asked if I would follow him. I’d been caught. No press pass. But he was leading me into the area at one side of the armory where behind some makeshift walls the three television networks (yes, there were only three then) had set up their cameras and other gear to broadcast live. “Would you like to be interviewed on the evening news,” the man asked. “It will be live.” Would I, wow, I thought, amid a jumble of other reactions, including sweaty palms and a rapid heartbeat. It happened so fast that for years, I thought Howard K. Smith from ABC interviewed me, but he had not started working there yet. It probably was Douglas Edwards, the CBS anchor. He asked me where I was from and something else which I have forgotten. The network had learned that a couple of colleges had reporters there: Michigan State and Holy Cross, the Catholic (all men then) college in Worcester, Mass., and they grabbed me to interview. The whole experience lasted less than 30 seconds. When I rejoined Kit and Sharon, they asked where I’d been. Still flustered, I told them. Neither seemed to care. We all were too caught up in the excitement of real journalism, and we had a deadline to meet. (Note: My mother later told me she was home eating dinner when a friend called to tell her to turn her television on to the news. She did and saw me being interviewed.) As the deadline for our newspaper, a morning publication, loomed, we had to come up with a story. From talking to some of the reporters working near us, we figured we wouldn’t have a “who won the election” story until around midnight at the earliest. (It turns out we were overly optimistic on the timing.) So one of us dictated a story about what was happening in the armory and another was typing it. Ever resourceful Kit found a telephone so we could call our newspaper and dictate the story.

A CLOSE ELECTION As the evening wore on, Kennedy staff members would drop by the armory and step up on the stage in the front of the room to give us an update on what the candidate was doing. Watching the returns with staff and family members was one report. Jackie had gone to bed was another. Then around midnight Bobby Kennedy came on the stage. Now we expected to get some real news. But all we learned was that the candidate continued to keep a tally of the votes and that he would not be making any public announcements anytime soon. A wave of disappointed murmuring wafted across the armory.

CANDIDATE Kennedy casts his ballot in one of the nation's closest elections. Courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

I don’t recall how we learned the results, but I think there was a large board near the stage where updated numbers were regularly posted. I desperately wanted Senator Kennedy to be the 35th president of the United States. I remember being equally distressed and elated as the results changed almost minute by minute. In what proved to be a sliver of political irony, Richard Nixon was waiting out the results in a suite in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the same place where Sen. Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination eight years later, was assassinated. The 1960 election proved to be the closest since 1916 when the incumbent Woodrow Wilson was challenged by Charles Evans Hughes, the chief justice of the United States.

Wilson won with 49.2 percent of the popular vote to 46.1 for Hughes. As midnight came and went and our adrenaline was slowly abating, we did not realize that the results of this election would be even closer.

In the end, Kennedy received 49.7 percent of the votes, and Nixon got 49.6 percent. (The popular vote was 34,220,984 for Kennedy and 34,108,157 for Nixon.) It was shortly after 3 a.m. that the press corps in the armory learned that Nixon had just made a speech. While not conceding the election, he hinted that Kennedy was the victor.

Courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

The reporters remained skeptical, and Kit, Sharon and I wondered what our candidate was doing and whether or not we would ever see him. Exhausted and hungry, we waited and waited. Finally word seeped into the armory that Kennedy would be declared the winner. There even was a rumor that he would address the press in the armory. No one knew when. Covering the election was the fulltime job of the 250 reporters there. But our job was that of a fulltime student, and we needed to head back to Michigan. Late that Wednesday morning, we reluctantly walked out of the armory and headed to our car. Damn, we may have missed the president elect when his car drove up to the armory a short time later so he could give his victory speech, Jackie at his side, and his parents and other family members nearby. But we did get a free room and a couple of hours of sleep. As we were walking to our car, two television cameramen spotted us and asked where we were from. When we explained that we had driven from Michigan to Hyannis to cover the election, they concluded we had not slept since Monday. “Here,” they said, tossing us a motel room key. “We are about to check out, but you guys can have our room until 2 this afternoon. It’s across the street.” Never had sleep come so easily and lasted such a brief time. But those few hours kept us going for the trip back to campus.

A LAST STOP We had one more stop to make. Our journalism professor, George Hough, had insisted that we stop in Falmouth, a small town just under an hour’s drive from Hyannis. “Just ask anyone you see in Falmouth, they’ll know where my parents’ house is.” His father and mother were journalists, and they owned the Falmouth Enterprise. Not surprisingly, we were given directions by someone in a store on a main street. The house turned out to be a graceful, old center-hall colonial. We rang the bell, and a rather startled woman in her sixties opened the door to find three disheveled, somewhat groggy college students, who said, “Hi. Your son said we should visit you.” We didn’t add that what he also said was, “She’ll let you take a shower and feed you.” One look at her perfectly furnished, pale yellow living room had told us maybe a quick “hello” would be sufficient. She gave us cookies and milk, and after some thank you’s, we headed west for Michigan. All I recall of that trip was sitting in the back typing the story we would turn in the following day.

Author

Linda Lotridge Levin

LINDA LOTRIDGE LEVIN'S knowledge of presidential libraries comes in part from her first-hand experience as an author and scholar, which included her research at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum for her 2008 book about Stephen Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary.Levin for several decades has been a leading figure in shaping Rhode Island journalism as a reporter, author, professor and advocate for press freedom, and she was a pioneer in opening journalism to women when the field was dominated by men. A faculty member of the Department of Journalism at the University of Rhode Island since 1983, she was chair of the department from 2001 to 2011, and in that capacity, she has been responsible for the training of hundreds of the state’s and the nation’s journalists. Levin’s teaching areas include media law, history of American journalism, media criticism and advanced reporting. A former president of the Rhode Island Press Association, she has worked as a reporter and editor for the Providence Journal. She also worked as a freelance writer, specializing in health and medicine, and she wrote a nationally-syndicated column on the subjects. She won three grants to work with journalists in the Soviet Union and Russia, and she was a founder of ACCESS/ Rhode Island, an open government coalition. Levin was awarded the Yankee Quill Award by the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and the New England Society of Professional Journalists. She has been inducted into the Rhode Island Journalism Hall of Fame and the Academy of New England Journalists. She has been a fellow of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the American Press Institute and the Annenberg Washington Program. Levin is the author and co-author of four books. Her latest is The Making of FDR, The Story of Stephen T. Early, America’s first Modern Press Secretary, published in 2008 by Prometheus Books. Publishers Weekly wrote that Levin “delivers a smart and definitive Early biography,” and it added that the book “ is a must-read for anyone interested in FDR and his era or in the power of presidential image makers.”This series is copyrighted by Linda Lotridge Levin

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